Transmission #30: Plain language, bionic eyes, kiki and bouba, and pizza as a leading indicator.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
This is an ongoing fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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Design
Their Bionic Eyes are Now Obsolete and Unsupported
Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris, IEEE Spectrum
Notes from the near future, already arrived, when cutting edge tech meets long-term dependency meets short-term business models.
Second Sight made an incredible piece of technology – a bionic eye that communicated with the vision areas of the brain, allowing blind people to see again. Albeit in monochrome, and at very low resolution. Still, the promise of giving sight to the blind was extraordinary, and soon Second Sight had hundreds of patients.
What happened next is essentially the title of the piece. Second Sight was losing money, and it turns out that while patients may have thought they were buying their sight back, what they were actually doing was renting a service that supported the physical hardware that was embedded in their body. And so when that service stopped, they were left in the strange state of having part of themselves depreciated, made obsolete.
An absolute pandora’s box of questions about how closely we intertwine our life with complex technical systems.
Ideas
What makes writing more readable?
Story by Rebecca Monteleone and Jamie Brew, Design + code by Michelle McGhee, The Pudding
I work in design consulting, and as much as I enjoy the 27-clause sentences of someone like David Foster Wallace in my private reading, much of my professional writing involves trying to wrestle complex ideas into plain language that anyone can understand.
This article tries to break down some of the algorithmic approaches to defining plain language (not as easy as you might think), and asks us to do more to be more inclusive in the language we use. As Richard Feynman liked to quip, if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you probably don’t really understand it yourself.
Why Are Letters Shaped the Way They Are?
Shayla Love, Vice Magazine
Understanding iconicity - how some words have a kind of synesthesic quality, where the sounds and textures and associations tend to reinforce one another across the senses.
Researchers found that words that express the texture of roughness are more likely to have a trilled /r/ noise, and other variations of /r/. In English the researchers looked at adjectives that described roughness, the ten roughest being: abrasive, barbed, jagged, rough, spiky, thorny, harsh, coarse, prickly, scratchy. (Compared to the ten ten smoothest words include smooth, lubricated, oily, slippery, silky, slick, polished, satiny, velvety, and fine).
Quotes
Typically, the cost of hand-loading a ship would be about $5.86 per ton. With McLean’s new [shipping container] system, the price dropped to only 16 cents per ton.
– The Hidden Costs of Containerisation, The Prospect
Chart of the Week
Other
🧱 People have built some really amazing things in Minecraft. Link
🔐 Yet another brutal takedown of crypto by a tech legend, this time by NVIDIA co-founder David Rosenthal, critiquing, among other things) the centralisation of power by miners in this supposedly decentralised system. Link
🍕 Leading indicators that something big is happening in the world: late pizza deliveries to Pentagon. Link
📸 File under ‘some of the most useful innovations are in the most boring places’: the first-ever technical specification designed to certify the source and history of digital media. Link
🚢 If you’ve been following the ‘Great Supply Chain crisis’, here is an insightful view into how the oligopoly of global shipping alliances have helped lead us to this point. Link
🍒 Machine learning is making fruits and vegetables more delicious. Link
🛒 How Facebook quietly built Marketplace, and kept another few billion users hooked to the platform. Link
🖥 Wonderful thread of Apple industrial design prototypes from the 80s and 90s. Link
📍 How aware of your surroundings are you, really. The Big Here Quiz. Link
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